Posts by Dan 55

Delicious irony as Euro alliance pumps €1M of Microsoft's money into open source cloud federation tech

Re: Out in the cold, again.

Looks like the OP does, CISPE is based in Belgium. Also the OP read up to the penultimate paragraph, at least.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: When you're ubiquitous...

Functionality - I guess you're going to say it does enterprise management like nothing else, but have you ever seen the fun you can have in Windows, Teams, Office, and SharePoint trying to get it to reflect an organisational merger or split?

Staff familiarity - apart from the complete UI redos for 8, 10, 11...

Compatibility - unless developers stick to Win32 then their new framework du jour will probably be dead in five years.

"Better"

Here to collect my free downvote.

Xenix

Never used it, but it can't have been as bad as modern day Windows.

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: Given Moz's Changes in T&Cs/Privacy Policies

I thought that TB and Mozilla have been separate entities for quite a while now, despite TB borrowing some of Mozilla's server infrastructure.

Re: cheers

I was spoiled with Lotus Notes email for most of my work life.

On the other hand my work life was spoiled with Lotus Notes email.

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

I don't think they have the luxury of so many developers sat around twiddling their fingers and they know what their users would and wouldn't like.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Re: Hey Microsoft

Have you turned them on yet though?

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Re: "xAI and X's futures are intertwined."

Meanwhile in the west we're still all in the grip of tulip mania.

Re: If it quacks like investor fraud...

Tesla is meme stock and the shareholders haven't realised it yet, apart from the shareholders on Telsa's board who are selling like there's no tomorrow.

Brits to build ExoMars landing gear after Russia sent packing

So what about when Rosocosmos suspended cooperation with NASA or are they best buddies again already?

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

There are two USB keyboard profiles, the normal one and the boot one. The main distinguishing point is the boot profile only sends up to 6 keys at once whereas the normal profile sends as many or as few keys as the keyboard wants (and was thought overly complex for BIOSes to implement).

In theory both profiles can be sent at once although some keyboards don't do that, some BIOSes don't specifically ask for the boot profile so the keyboard sends just the normal profile, and other BIOSes can't deal with receiving both profiles at the same time and parsing just the boot profile although they should be able to.

If your keyboard has a key combo to disable NKRO or enable 6KRO then the BIOS might suddenly start responding to the keyboard.

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

Could be your keyboard doesn't have the USB boot keyboard profile enabled (or it simply doesn't do it) or a BIOS option to speed up boot by not enabling USB until afterwards is set or one of 1001 other options for designed to catch you out?

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: POTUS

Now the UK has built aircraft carriers designed to carry the F35B. If you wanted to build things yourself to obtain independence, this wouldn't be the way to go about it.

Re: POTUS

France did develop their own defence tech but Trident was developed by Lockheed.

Re: POTUS

The quid pro quo for the freeloading was stability, trade with the US dollar as the currency of trade, the European nations didn't ramp up their defence industries (which just after WW2 was seen as a bad thing) and what they did buy they bought from the US, and in the main support for the US' jollies around the world as European nations didn't want to scupper their trade or defence.

If that's not good enough now and the US wants to throw its relationship with western European countries away and instead tie its future to one country with the GDP of Italy and its leader which is openly taking the piss but POTUS and the cabinet are too dumb to see it, so be it.

Re: 2025-03-26 06:12 CET

The BlueSky post used the original headline 5 minutes after publishing here.

Perhaps there is an overnight Perl script to merkinize articles before the UK wakes up so the UK commentariat doesn't notice and make vexatious complaints, or maybe the Australians have already capitulated to US demands (so much for El Reg targetting the lucrative US market, in 4 years time they'll be banging rocks together).

ReactOS emits release 0.4.15 – its first since 2021

The ARM port of ReactOS is taking a while, like the rest of it.

The hardware's changed a bit

The Reg FOSS desk installed a fresh copy of XP 64 just two years ago and we are almost ashamed to admit that we really enjoyed the experience. Compared to modern Windows, it's sleek, elegant, and fast.

In the before times I remember going through the services disabling the unnecessary ones to get more speed out of XP.

It seems whenever hardware improves, software bloats to fill up the space.

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

CVE-2021-35587 9.8 critical

This is why Oracle Cloud is reassuringly expensive.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

Can't see any US company in the UK supporting this

This is their plans for the working week:

Sergey Brin tells Google employees that 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot' for productivity. Some beg to differ.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Re: Why even have a local disk?

Sun X terminals, no local storage, runs over the network. What goes around comes around.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Re: Yes it is a calculated pivot

We are symbiotics

Argh, get it off, get it off!

Yes it is a calculated pivot

USAID will switch to crypto. Perhaps it's even the start of an attack on Fiat currency as foreign countries will have to use crypto to deal with Uncle Sam.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Re: Palantir is Peter Thiel's organization

The UK should already be reverse-peddling on any contracts it already has with Palantir, to do anything less is incompetence.

You know that generative AI browser assistant extension is probably beaming everything to the cloud, right?

It's the next gold rush

As befits the American tradition.

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Do the OTF fund Signal?

If they don't, they'd better start now, and they should be safe.

The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

In which we see war planning by emoji, in case you doubted their suitability to run a government.

The government doesn't need to manage its finances like a household because the government is not a household. The analogy is a false one, but that hasn't stopped people falling for the argument over the past 40 years or more.

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Built-in Javascript engine?

So I guess you mean...

NaN NaN NaN NaN, NaN NaN NaN NaN, hey hey, goodbye...

Re: Gnome3.....Gnome4..........Ughhhhhhhhhh!!!!

If ever you want a terrible piece of software to spread around the major Linux distributions, just concentrate your efforts on making sure Red Hat picks it up and pushes it and then the rest will happen of its own accord.

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

Re: Nepenthes

If these are AI generated pages, there's no guarantee they are factually accurate unless there is a human reviewing them.

Also, why would they want to play nice and do an AI crawler's homework for it? Far better to feed it misinformation to make the AI's output worthless for users as the one thing an AI company hates doing is retraining as it's expensive and time consuming.

Nepenthes

Did Cloudflare just implement Nepenthes or do something significantly different to that?

The blog page says "To generate convincing human-like content, we used Workers AI with an open source model to create unique HTML pages on diverse topics" so it sounds like Nepenthes with their own training data.

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

46,096 wankpanzers sold

I honestly thought it would be a whole lot more by now, perhaps there's hope for humanity yet.

Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits

Re: Don't buy closed hardware in the first place

You don't have a locked bootloader or undocumented hardware to deal with on IBMs or Suns. When the difficulty level is too high and you're dependent on just one distro, it's time to look for other hardware. Also if only one small team has the skill to hack the hardware then there's a higher chance of burnout and users being left high and dry.

Open source software would also benefit if the market for open hardware grew, that won't happen if people buy locked-down hardware in spite of the manufacturer clearly not wanting them as customers.

Re: Don't buy closed hardware in the first place

MacOS userland is not particularly great, GPL3 software is missing and software which moved from GPL2 to GPL3 is stuck on the latest GPL2 version which could be over a decade old and obsolete. Personally I think that's a great argument for AGPL3, just to be sure that multinationals which take but never give won't profit from open source software.

You can use homebrew or VMs but that's hardly a great argument in MacOS's favour, if you have to do that you might as well just use Windows.

Don't buy closed hardware in the first place

This kind of thing is why, as much as you'd like to use an open OS on closed hardware, you can't.

Buy hardware from other suppliers who offer what you need and deserve your money more than Apple.

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

Re: Picking winners

Given where Google's R&D investment ends up, it'd be quicker just to burn the money.

Re: Picking winners

The German Sovereign Tech fund is successful and brings improvements to open source projects we all use, what's wrong with doing that on an EU-wide scale?

EU says Google scroogles app makers, also gives Apple an antitrust must-do-list

The commission's findings require us to make even more changes to how we show certain types of Search results, which would make it harder for people to find what they are looking for and reduce traffic to European businesses

I'm willing to take that chance, Google's search changes over the past five or so years already make it harder for people to find what they are looking for and Gemini reduces traffic to businesses.

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Re: a renaming frenzy that includes the Gulf of America

Something worse than now, which is getting shot.

Down is up, left is right, lies are truths and those who report on the truth are lairs.

This is this week's loyalty test, next week there will be another one. Please stand by.

P.S. Note that failure to pass loyalty tests will have career-changing consequences.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Re: Coretools has a good test suite and has been battle tested over decades

It's a brave person that can claim that Rust is invulnerable where all other languages aren't. And as for easier to maintain, for who exactly?

Coretools has a good test suite and has been battle tested over decades

So, er, porting it to a new language seems to be complete waste of time and effort and could introduce bugs?

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

Re: "President Trump's ongoing trade war ..."

When making up complete bullshit, it always helps to manufacture a grievance, play the victim, and blame someone else.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

It's not a problem

As LLMs have trained people to view getting an answer which is completely wrong for no discernable reason as something acceptable, software companies firing people and telling the junior staff left to use an LLM to make up for lost productivity means that unreliable software will also be more acceptable.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: AI isn’t

Would human thought pause while waiting for input from a prompt?

AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites

Re: Silicon valley destroying everything

And this is the vaunted innovation that the US leads in and that Europe should aspire to? You can keep it, thanks. It's just modern-day wild west snake oil.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

Re: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity"

Can we just not pay him?

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Re: I hope he learned his lesson

We are allowed to make a living eating leftovers from Big Tech's table... if we jump through their hoops first.

Re: I for one...

Could I send you a BMP buried in a PowerPoint instead?